


Wergild

by Chocoholic221B



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vikings, Angst, Complicated Relationships, Happiness what's that, M/M, Religion, Set firmly in 1008-1020, Vinland Saga-inspired, monologues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:55:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23608708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chocoholic221B/pseuds/Chocoholic221B
Summary: Following the slaughter of his farming village in Northern York, Kurapika is caught between a normal life and revenge. When he is saved from a life of enslavement by the very group of Jomsvikings that had pillaged his village years ago, there seems to be only one logical step forward: Infiltration. But the longer he's in their company, the more he loses his way.
Relationships: Kurapika/Leorio Paladiknight, Kuroro Lucifer | Chrollo Lucifer/Kurapika
Comments: 12
Kudos: 41





	Wergild

**Author's Note:**

> Not my HxH big bang fic but kinda wish it was because the writer’s block isn’t as heavy with this one. ANYWAY, guess who finally watched Vinland Saga eheh. 
> 
> Anyway, this is unbetaed, unrevised, every college professor's worst nightmare. Probably riddled with inaccuracies and tonal problems, but gd, it was so much fun to write.
> 
> Also, happy Easter to any and all who celebrate. I know COVID-19 has been hard on all of us, but I believe we can all get through this together!

Wergild:

Chapter One:

**_June 1st, 1008_** **_AD_**

The first body he finds is one of the village women, nearly unrecognizable after days of a slow decay, bloated, with a strange foam leaking from the mouth. Her dress and apron are in tatters now, soaked in rain and mud. Three wooden arrows are sticking out of her chest, Scandinavian runes etched into the elm. The rain on his skin feels colder now.

Danes.

Kurapika runs ahead, catching sight of other corpses along the path to the village. 




They are strewn across the street, as if they’d been pulled from their homes and cut through one by one. He only counts one hundred, but he doubts their assailants would let a little thing like a forest get in the way of them and their prey. They hadn’t spared the women and children, as most tend to do, if only so they could sell them as slaves to the rich. Kurapika finds his mother and father among the fallen ravens gathering around them. He kicks at the birds and they leave to find other corpses to desecrate. A wooden rosary is clung to by her swollen hands. 

_ Work fast now, Kurapika. _

He stands, coughing as the stench of decay climbs down into his lungs. 

_ Before the flesh falls from the bone.  _

How is he to bury them when all their possessions have been pillaged? Every sword, spear, and shield, all their jewelry had been stripped from their homes and bodies. They might as well have stolen the wood and stone of their huts as well. 

A bitter smile spreads across his face, then wobbles and falls away. The next village is too far to ask them for help. They’d spent so much time trying to isolate themselves, fearing an attack, and it had been for naught. War is only ever a step behind them.

He finds a small, rusty spade by a fence enclosing a field of wheat, now burnt, leaving only blackened stubs of stalks behind. Kurapika had helped plant this season, begrudgingly so. They had been growing exceptionally well. The leaders had been so pleased.

There’s a small graveyard in their village, meant for peaceful deaths. It’s situated on a hill where the sun shines the brightest and marigolds flourish. Kurapika picks a spot with the least flowers and begins to dig. He sits in the mud and grass and begins to pick at the earth. His clothes clamp down on his skin, rain drips off him, but he feverishly proceeds with his task. His parents are put to rest first, placed in a joint grave, and then covered with mud that’s begun to wash away. 126 more graves required digging, so he leaves them and hopes the three stones he’d placed on their resting place don’t disappear. Dig, drag, cover. His best friend, his neighbor, a young widow and her child. He tries to keep the families together, so they wouldn’t look so lonely. Three days pass by, dragging corpses from the forest, and when the sun comes out on the second day the rain is replaced by sweat. When he’s finished, he lets himself lay on the hill, amidst the marigolds and the grass and the dirt of covered graves. The spade lies nearby, covered in blood from the scabs on his palms and fingers.

_ It’s done _ . 

A spider crawls across his arm, and he wonders if it’s one of those venomous ones his mother warned him about. He hopes it is. Dying from hunger seems so dull, so painful, so far away. 

_ Will someone bury me. Or will the ravens have their fill first?  _

He coughs, body warmer than usual. Will he die from thirst or from the fever? He won’t be conscious of it anyway. 

The next few days he slips in and out of a fever dream, bombarded with dreams of his loved ones being massacred. Though as he draws closer to death, the dreams become a bit more pleasant, and he stops wanting to awaken. 

On one of those days, he is lifted from his spot on the hill. Hot porridge and tea is forced down his throat, along with bitter herbs. A voice hovers above him, and he’s unsure of whether it’s trying to be encouraging or insulting. There are a few times where he is lifted out of his fever dreams long enough to catch a glimpse of his surroundings and his tone-deaf savior. He only remembers a head of spiky black hair and a scowl.

He remembers the visions with much more clarity. Often, they feel more real than the tranquil hut he lays in. It’s Pairo that frequents his nightmares the most. Intelligent, brave, soft-spoken Pairo, forever burdened with an illness Kurapika had led him to. Well, not anymore, he supposes. 

_ “You worry too much, Kurapika,” _ the specter says.  _ “We’ll be okay.” _

They’re surrounded by vicious men, then, and they pass through Kurapika as if he’s the imaginary one. Pairo is torn before his eyes.

That is his last dream before the fever dies.

_ June 12th, 1008 AD _

He awakens to the stained white canopy of a tent, and the smell of grass basking in the sun after a period of rain. There’s the sound of dried leaves being crushed, of water being poured into a wooden cup. His tongue slides around his mouth and then his lips, but there’s no saliva to swallow, and he chokes on air. 

“You’re awake,” a juvenile voice speaks, shoving a cup of red liquid in his hands. “Drink.” 

“What is this?” he croaks. 

The boy peers down at him, his limbs long and awkward, like they’d been attached to the wrong body. A slightest hint of stubble grows on his chin, little pinpricks of dark hair. He wears a brown tunic and pants. A bandana the color of brick is wrapped around his head. 

“Rosehip tea, for the infection.” It could be poison for all he cares.

“Why did you save me?”

The boy’s hands pause as they tinker with something off to the side. More medicine, no doubt. “I’m a doctor. Leaving you to die would’ve been wrong of me.” 

“I’d made peace with that fate,” Kurapika replies, as the boy takes the cup out of his hands and replaces it with a warm bowl of soup. His palms rejoice at the feeling. “I have nothing left.” 

The boy wraps an arm around his shoulders to help him sit. ”Only eat as much as you can. We don’t want to throw too much into your body after such a long time.”

“You didn’t answer me.” 

“I did.” 

“You didn’t tell me the truth.” 

Their eyes met, and the boy couldn’t seem to hold his gaze. “Well, I figured if you weren’t dead yet, there must be something keeping you alive.”

“Spiritual?”

“Not really,” he replies, enveloping him in a wool blanket. “I’m more of a man of science.”

Kurapika has nothing to say to that, so he forces the soup down his throat and announces he’d like to sleep more. The boy pats him on the back twice and tells him to get some rest. He’s left alone once more.

Kurapika doesn’t fall into slumber easily anymore. He used to, swaddled in warm blankets of fur or wool in the winter, and maybe just a cool linen sheet in the summer, huddling close to Pairo regardless of the season. That reality only exists in dreams now, but he’s too afraid to close his eyes. 

He focuses instead on the sliver of scenery etched out between the two pieces of canvas. The boy is probably rummaging around outside in the shrubbery. Raindrops are plucked from their places on the fabric, the trees and fall to the moist ground below. They stick to leaves and strands of grass. It’s so bright, so unnecessary. 

He turns onto his side. Shadowed, stained walls greet him, and all he can do is stare. 

_ June 20th, 1008 AD _

Kurapika watches the boy, Leorio, peel a tub of potatoes. It didn’t take long for him to realize that Leorio is of the type that never tires of talking. He’ll exhaust any topic with a fervor, and Kurapika would listen because his voice is a comfort in the silence of the forest. 

“What made you decide to be a doctor?” 

The boy looks up from his work, rusty knife pausing. 

“What?” Kurapika asks. Surely his question isn’t so unsettling as to render him speechless. 

Leorio shakes his head, his face turning a bit softer now. “You haven’t spoken a word since the first day. It was getting lonely.” 

“You were alone before this, weren’t you?”

“It’s different being on your own. You don’t notice it as much,” he replies, tossing a potato into the pot beside him. “I’d like to get to know you better.”

Something in him twists into a know. He isn’t sure how to reject him. He isn’t sure if it’s possible, considering he has nowhere else to go. “You might find I’m not that good of a companion.”

“Oh, I’ve realized that already,” Leorio says, picking up the pot to put it on the fire outside. His voice, cracking a bit on the second syllable, continues to mumble, “Doesn’t mean I can’t like you anyway.” 

Kurapika watches him stoke the fire, eyes following the flames until his lids start to feel heavy. 

“My best friend died of a fever long ago,” he hears him speak, though it feels like it’s meant more for the forest than for him. “It could’ve been cured if we had a good enough doctor. But those doctors only work for Lords and Kings. Nobility. I wanted to become just as good as them, better even, and then serve only the common people. I’d turn away every bratty aristocrat that came my way. I wouldn’t speak for anyone’s money.” 

“How noble,” Kurapika whispers from his cot. 

The silence that comes after is expected and unwelcome. A few minutes later, Leorio returns with two bowls of vegetable stew. It is, like with all of his cooking, adequate.

“What are you going to do?” Leorio finally asks, having yet to take a bite of the stew. “About what happened to your village?” 

Kurapika hates the question. He doesn’t know how to answer. Not that he doesn’t know the answer. His teachings had always made it quite clear. _ “Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing.” _ But God doesn’t seem in a rush to make the Danes repent. Why should he fear God in the face of such evil? Ah, but he doesn’t even know who these Danes are. Could he fight honorably against a group of thirty or forty men? He’s barely trained in the way of the sword, always preferring a pen or a book.

“I don’t know.”  _ No, I know. _ He just doesn’t know how to get there. A path with two ends and no middle.

“Well,” Leorio replies, shoving half a potato into his mouth. “You can stay with me until you figure it out.” 

They stare at one another for a second, and then Kurapika scoffs. “Don’t speak with your mouth full.”

_ October 14th, 1008 AD _

He travels with Leorio for three and a half months. They go to York for a supply run, trying to race ahead of the brisk winters of Northern England. Leorio sells their wool blanket for a generous two hundred silver pennies. It gets them a tiny room in an Inn on one of the more crowded streets, full of drunk men from all sorts of professions, from soldier to baker, all seeking release from their lives and families. Kurapika sticks close to Leorio, if only to keep himself from mouthing off to one of them. 

They go down to the market on Shambles on a Tuesday, when the greatest number of grocers and craftsmen decide to sell their goods. The crowded, narrow streets have started to make Kurapika nervous by now, so the plaza is a welcome change. Everything is warm-hued in the plaza, from the clothes to the sand-colored streets. Stalls with multi-colored, striped canopies are lined up along the sides, with smiling sellers all around. The smiling heads yell at them to buy their goods – jewels, spices, expensive-looking fabrics – but Leorio only focuses on the necessities. And even then, he often barters for the items until the seller either cracked or cussed at him. 

“Leorio, let me help as well,” Kurapika says, somewhere between the fruit cart and the dried meat section. 

Leorio glances down at him. All his ‘street smarts’ have gone to his head in Kurapika’s opinion. If he listens to one more talk of how intelligent and well-spoken the other boy is, he might just go mad, and madness isn’t welcome in these parts. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he answers. “Believe me, I know how a market works.”

Leorio’s fingers fiddle with the black satchel on his arm, sleeves fraying at the hems, and pulled his lips into a pout. Ah, time to bring in his last resort.

His head tilts to the side, and he takes a few steps closer, so that he’s forced to strain his neck a bit to look him in the eye. “Please?” And smile.

“I hate you,” Leorio mumbles, pouting more and averting his eyes, all while his hands undo the clasp of his satchel and retrieve a bundle of coins. “I really do.” 

The bundle lands in his open hands and Kurapika loosens the string keeping it closed. He counted the amount: fifty pennies in all. Biting his lip, he reaches up and pats Leorio’s cheek, almost lovingly.

“You shouldn’t be giving out money to those you hate, love,” he teases. Teasing is easy with Leorio. Everything is. It’s easier to ignore the world with Leorio by his side, lips always loaded with another clever joke, a kind remark, aimed straight for his heart. A part of Kurapika hates him for it. He had no one else to hate. No one alive and well, with a face and a name. He can hate their attackers, and does, and wishes he could do something about it. He can hate people, just people, the ones from villages other than his own, for not saving them in their time of need. He can hate the village elders, for not having the sense to be closer to other villages, to build an alliance with them, so they could defend themselves. He can hate the God of his people for the cruelty he wroughts with his own design. He hates himself for being too weak to fight and too stubborn to die. 

“That’ll be five pence, my dear,” says the woman at the dessert stall. It isn’t on the list, but Kurapika knows how much Leorio loves sweets. He probably hates that too, somewhere deep inside.

_ Pathetic, you’re separated for a minute and you’re falling to pieces. _

“Thank you.” He takes the bag of buns into his arms, pausing when the sound of impressed chatter erupts in the square. With one arm holding the paper bag in his arms, he makes his way to the source of the noise.

A young man stands in the center of the crowd, flailing an old sword around. Kurapika recognizes the expensive threadwork of Danish nobility in his clothing. 

“Behold!” he yells, and Kurapika nearly decides to go back to the stalls just to spite him. “A genuine longsword belonging to the famed Jomsviking, Feitan, a prized Phantom Troupe warrior.” 

He’s probably trying to sell it.

Kurapika stays, because a Dane is a Dane, and a noble Dane means they might know his village’s assailants. 

“Hundreds of adversaries have been slayed with this hand-crafted weapon! The fury of Feitan the Rising Sun is embedded in this very sword! The runes on the side are a sacred enchantment promising good fortune in battle!” The poor people up front must be getting so much spit to the face. How unsanitary.

“Kurapika,” a hand falls on his shoulder and Kurapika is pulled away from the crowd. Leorio stands behind him, forehead wrinkling in concern. “You okay?”

He pulls his stash of food close to his chest. “Yeah. I’ve got everything on my end.”

Leorio’s lower lip juts out a bit, as it does when he wants to push further, but he’s promptly distracted by the bag of sweet-smelling buns in Kurapika’s hand. “Are those . . . hot cross buns?” 

“Oh, yes, sorry. I shouldn’t have used the money for something other than –” 

Leorio has already taken the bag from his hands. “I thought they only made these during Lent! Lord, I’m starving. Hey, here, have one. You’re getting skinny.” 

“Speak for yourself,” Kurapika chides, though he takes the bun offered to him. It’s a warm, spiced bread, and he finds himself more ravenous than expected, his mouth watering as soon as the fluffy crumb of the bun melts on his tongue. 

“See? See? They’re good, aren’t they?” Leorio says, excitedly, as they begin to walk in the direction of their Inn, just a few blocks away. 

“I’m the one who picked them out.”

_ October 16th, 1008 AD _

Kurapika walks down the steps of the Inn on Thursday. The bar on the first floor is manned as usual, and filled with a variety of drunk individuals. He’d spent the majority of yesterday inside packing, and his body has grown restless and bored since then. Leorio is still sound asleep in their room, happy to finally have a warm bed to go home to and a roof over his head. Kurapika could waste his life away underneath the stars. His parents would’ve liked that for him, as would their God. 

Something else must be ruling his life, then, because the first person he notices on the street is the Dane from the market. What he is doing there, he has no idea. He has enough money to splurge on the rich part of York. Then again, the rich have always had a fascination with poverty. The cheap alcohol and brothels are probably a draw for men like him as well. 

Kurapika takes in the fine garments adorning his body: the polished armor, the flowing red cape, black boots and gloves, and a single sword hanging from his waist. He sits with two other men, both dressed in the clothes of peasants. Three large wooden tankards of beer have been placed on the table before them.

Against his better judgment, he approaches them.

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Hello, yes, I'm back. After this, I'm retreating back into my HxHBB cave. Goodbye for now.
> 
> 2) Please feel free to leave your thoughts down below! I love reading them almost as much as I love responding to them. 
> 
> 3) If you're worried about either ship, I'll break it down for you all. Leopika - Has small amount of screentime, but probably endgame. KuroKura - Very spicy, very heavy, very angsty. Will probably have sex a few times. Emotionally unrequited probably? Take up most of the screentime like the attention hogs they are.


End file.
